"To Everyone I Know (and Some I Don't)"
B Y J E F F B A R A BHey friends,
I feel so eager to share! I spent some time today looking through old writings and blog posts from months ago. How different I feel nowadays! This journey has been one of new vistas and locales, but even more so of self-discovery. Those early posts strike me now as downright boring, like I thought just being in new places was enough to make the writing exciting. Those posts are so full of ideas and plans for the future, sometimes lost in the details, wanting things to be different than they were. I wrote about what I did and saw, and where I went, but not so much about how I was feeling, and that’s the real color of life! Suddenly, in this new body of mine, feeling is the key!
I went to see Avatar for the 5th time yesterday afternoon. Afterwards, I walked out of the theatre and into the warm-cool air of early evening in west coast India. Sitting on the front steps of the theatre, collecting myself, enjoying myself, I had a kind of major breakthrough, about why I love that movie so much, and movies and novels and music in general - it’s cause in movies, you can really feel; I can really feel.
I can feel sad and happy, angry and ecstatic, melancholic and bittersweet, and I don’t have to hold myself back from feeling, running from some emotions and into others. I realized that that’s the key I’ve been missing in my life for so long: feeling, feeling my hand behind me, flush with the concrete; the air pushing and pulling through my nostrils; the pleasant weight of my body in the gravity of Earth. I can feel happy and unhappy, centered or off-kilter, uncomfortable, shaky, nervous, calm, at home.
I’ve been in India for almost 3 months now, at a very a-typical ashram, and this time has allowed me to really breakthrough, into a space I have deeply longed for, and that’s the part of me I want so badly to share. I had wanted to write another letter to everyone I know months back, while I was in Saigon, but I was scared and shy. “What will everyone think of me if I share my cheesy reflections?” It was like a mantra in my head, and the stage-anxiety I felt was enough to shut me down.
Now what do I feel? I feel that what people think doesn’t matter quite so much, and stronger, I feel a kind of raw excitement just to take another risk!
What will everyone think?
I don’t know!
Cool!
Let’s try it!
That’s where I am now, having realized that staying in the known is so predictable! If I don’t reach out to people, I already know what will happen: I will feel isolated, unwanted, unworthy of attention; I will feel that my problems are my own, my fears and jealousies skeletons to keep hidden in the closet, where they will only grow in power of cobwebs and despair. That’s the world I have known - no longer the world I want to know.
Coming out of Avatar yesterday, I saw something so clearly, soo clearly, and that is how it is our feelings that connect us to this world. In the movie, those beautiful, wild, and aware blue-skinned beings are connected to their world, in tune with its rhythms, sensitive to its needs. They are connected to their home in a way that humans have lost, or misplaced, but sitting in the night air out front, rickshaw horns screaming for attention, brown-skinned beauties eating street food from small fluorescent-lit stands, I felt connected. I felt connected to this place in India, and connected to something larger too. With my senses and heart open, sensations dancing through me like breath through a flute, I felt that life is not a business, not a task, not something to become or achieve. I felt again how the first rule of travel is that “wherever you are, there you are,” but I felt it in a deeper way too, how in some sense, location is a lie, because regardless of our latitude and longitude, we are always right here, always in our own self-same bodies. Feeling is that connection to the world, and sharing is its maintenance. “Feeling is the color in life” – this is what I felt so strongly last night.
So, what do I feel right now? I feel a deep excitement to share with so many people, even these cheesy reflections! I feel beautiful and free, comfortable and at home in my body, eager to go out to dinner with friends tonight and to dance party after that. I feel incredibly fortunate and appreciative to life for all it has given me. I feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, and nervous, and even angry, which is a great relief! I also feel like I wanted this email to be a bit more ‘call to arms’, revolutionary fervor, you know, “Feel people, feel! We are gods on Earth, not mice, not ants!!”, but also glad it’s come out softer than all that. And . . . I feel exceedingly grateful to have so many people to write to, to share with, to be connected to.
I sign off now with the lyrics from a favorite song of mine, by a band called Clem Snide. It’s called Moment in the Sun, and it expresses musically how I feel right now:
When it’s my moment in the sun,
Oh, how beautiful I’ll be!
But in a normal sort of way,
Like I am you, and you are me . . .
I have a lot of things to say,
And you’d be wise to listen good . . .
When it’s my moment in the sun,
I’ll share my problems with the world,
And psychosomatically I’ll sing,
To God and all His pretty girls . . .
When it’s my moment in the sun,
I won’t forget that I am blessed,
But every hero walks alone,
Thinking of more things to confess . . .
___________________
Great soft, warm & cool, loves,
Dala
Note from Daniel: I met Jeff and friend at a Workshop we were doing in Long Island, New York, back in 2004. He is a very powerful, spontaneous, and intelligent man! He follows Spirit daily, and uses many of his personal skills to inspire people around the world with the infinite possibilities which exist all around us. You can contact Jeff, and keep up with him via his Blog Site:
